Thursday, December 6, 2012

An Origin Story

In the Basement Era of analog cassette tapes all you needed was a steady hand, a screwdriver and some Scotch tape, the nerve to believe that a fortress made by man could be pried open and entered, and if you were lucky not to fatally crack the plastic case and get in, the world inside was promising, somehow comforting in its thereness, its tiny motocross of black tape and spindles over which you hover in a kind of preteen omniscience, your fingers impossibly large, trembling now to find and lift one end of the snapped tape and with a sliver of Scotch tape marry it back to the other end, all the while feeling as if you're creating fire or, because you'd just watched The Wizard Of Oz again with the family last night, that you've pulled aside the curtain, seeing what you're not supposed to be seeing, touching what had been invisible, magic, and private, the cassette tape vanishing and emerging from a dark you've now flooded with basement fluorescent light, humming, nervous as you reattach the plastic housing, hoping against hope that when you press play the homespun little-boy mend won't catch on the tape heads and split again, not aware even in your deepest imagination that one day tape will recede from the basements and bedrooms and rec rooms and from beneath tires on the driveway and streets out front, that one day the dark that you've imagined inside your Certron C90, the dark you cracked as puberty loomed and all sorts of unsolvable mysteries upstairs threatened, the dark entered with the suburban toolkit of tape-and-wish would merge with an anti-language spoken in 1's and 0's, that that dark that once seemed impenetrable would come to be seen as nonexistent, less a mystery to ponder than a digital nothingthere to never quite understand, a dark that stymies boys when they have the urge to mend, keep out.

Author of No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing (forthcoming), Field Recordings from the Inside (essays), This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began (essays), Conversations With Greil Marcus, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), and Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. ✸✸ Music Columnist for The Normal School. ✸✸ Five-time "Notable Essay" selection at Best American Essays. ✸✸ Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

MY BOOKS

“The collection’s 18 essays do what the best music writing is supposed to do—they make the reader care, regardless of whether they enjoy, or are familiar with, the material being written about; I was mostly willing to follow Bonomo anywhere he wanted to go.” Los Angeles Review of Books

"Joe Bonomo seems to have a Cornell box for each difficult, lyrical moment he remembers. He is a theorist of the self's construction out of the past, full of resistance and the heartbreaking urge to yield." David Lazar

"Marcus's knowledge of music and his widespread interests in related topics make this a delight and a real page-turner." The Big Takeover

"One of the five most important books about AC/DC." Jesse Fink, author of Bon: The Last Highway

"I've read most of the books about him and will now put Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found on the indispensable list. It's one of the best books about the man and his music." Lincoln Journal Star

"Joe Bonomo has written a fine book: a book not only about a band or times passed, but also about the rare virtue of endurance." Nick Tosches